The Furious Spinner

Last fall we posted interviews with writers Patricia Monaghan and Michaela Roessner. Today we're pleased to publish this wonderful interview with James Frenkel, Senitor Editor at Tor, who will give us a view from the other side of publishing.

K.A.: You are most well-known as an editor now for Tor as well as publisher and editor of Bluejay Books. You've been an editor for thirty years. I've always wondered how one comes to be an editor. Did you have other editors you looked to for inspiration? Did you want to follow in the footsteps of Max Perkins, Diana Athilll, Robert Gottleib, John Campbell, Herbert Gold, Judy-Lynn Del Rey? Could you share that process of becoming an editor with us?

J.F.: I became an editor in 1971—well, I started in publishing then, as an editorial assistant, which is generally how one becomes an editor. As for inspiration, I guess I was at first just trying to make a buck so I could afford to write and get an apartment. Then I discovered F. Scott Berg's fascinating biography of Maxwell Perkins, and decided that I wanted to be like that.

There's no one way one goes about working, as an editor; every book is different, and so is every author. Obviously, certain things hold true for most fiction in terms of grammar, story construction, narrative consistency and the like, but I can't say that any of the editors you mention was a template I tried to emulate. All of the ones you mention (the ones whose names I recognize—don't know of Diana Athill) have strengths I like. Judy Del Rey's editing I don't know that well. She was a great publisher, though, and editors have to learn to think like publishers.

I learned about editing on the job, which is how most people learn it, I bet. It's a lot like being an English major. You have to read carefully, try to understand what the author is doing, or trying to do. In a way, it's kind of strange at first, because as an English major you read mostly very good stuff, whereas as an editor, especially starting out as I did, in a house that published a lot of mass-market fiction that wasn't necessarily very well written (though some was), you're in the situation of having to be more critically acute in terms of: "What is the author trying to do, and can he or she actually accomplish it?"

I have had mentors, several. My first boss, Agnes Birnbaum, at Award Books, taught me a lot about the basics of procedure, production, and negotiation. Wendy Freborg, also at Award, taught me even more about the techniques of tracking production, dealing with tie-ins (which I've done throughout my career, and which, despite the sometimes horribly complicated wrinkles, I find fun for the most part). Wendy also gave me her copy of Words Into Type, which I kept until one of my interns a few years ago borrowed it and somehow forgot to return it, for which I will never forgive that intern, if I ever lay my hands on her again. Good thing I don't hold grudges. It was an old copy, though, and while it had sentimental value, a fair amount of it is now probably somewhat anachronistic. Oh, well.

I also was mentored by Harriet McDougall and Tom Doherty, for whom I worked at Grosset & Dunlap's YA Tempo Books imprint for a bit more than a year. It was, at the time, the most physically demanding job I'd ever had, except for when I put food on airplanes at Kennedy Airport one summer. I pretty singlehandedly edited and did the editorial production work on about 120 books in little over a year. Before you gasp and start to laugh in disbelief, let me explain. A fair number of those books had no real text inside. There were crossword puzzle books, comic-strip compilation books, and some other text-light books. But there were also non-fiction sports books, including one that I think we all still have nightmares about because of the incredible sloppiness of the text; there was a set of Astrology books, which had to be done on-time or not at all, which I handled with the grateful thanks of Harriet, who was my direct boss.

There were TV tie-in novels—Happy Days and Welcome Back, Kotter. I did an unauthorized edition of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon to tie-in to the Kubrick film. We did a CB-Radio book in a month—to beat the competition; we all had to work our fingers to the nub on that; then I did the Canadian edition by myself.

There was more, but I think you get the idea. But it wasn't so much the number of books I edited that was educational. What happened at that job was that Tom Doherty talked to me, as he did to all of us, and Tom was, as he still is, an incredible font of information, wisdom, common-sense, and flat-out publishing brilliance. He's probably more responsible for my success as an editor than anyone else. He taught me that the sales and marketing departments were our friends, not enemies to be feared and loathed, which had been the case at Award Books. At Award, if I went to the sales department, people would ask me, "Why?" Which happened a few times. I guess I was stubborn, and determined to try and get answers, like, "How many copies of this author's last book did we sell?" The sales manager was very grudging with that information. To this day I'm sure that he was afraid that somehow I was planning to use the information against him. How, I don't know. I'm not paranoid enough to figure that out.

But Tom showed me by example and in many conversations with him and others involved in sales, inside the company, and outside, with booksellers, that if an editor didn't know how books were sold, he might as well be working completely blind. Which makes a lot of sense, but nobody had ever volunteered to share this information with me before.

Tom would take me (not just me, but it was my turn) with him to meet with the editors of school bookclubs, and we would pitch various books to them, pretty successfully. They were nice people, smart, and eager to find books kids would read, and as a YA paperback house, we had a lot of books they could take, including the TV tie-ins, some of the sports biographies we did, and some of the comic-strip books, like Broom-Hilda, Hagar the Horrible, and Heathcliff, for example.

Tom also took me with him to visit wholesalers and jobbers, which was wonderful experience, because it introduced me to a side of publishing and distribution that I never would otherwise have seen.

And Tom had been in the business for more than a decade before me, probably more like fifteen years, including the time he spent as the Pocket Books sales manager when the Lord of the Rings was published by Ballantine . . . and distributed by Pocket Books. Altogether, he was, and is, a wonderful person to talk with about publishing, and I've been lucky to work for him. When I left Tempo in 1976 to work for Dell Books, he told me I should observe carefully, learn as much as I could, and he'd hire me back for more money sometime later. Well, as it turned out, it took more than a little while before he actually hired me again, but it was for a lot more money, and I've been very happy at Tor.

Oh, and when I left Tempo for Dell, Tom set up a lunch with me, him, and Bob Avery, a sales manager at Dell, so that I would have a good contact in the sales department there and be able to get information from sales, have a good working relationship, etc. That was something I've never forgotten. I can't think of another boss who would have done that.

I learned a lot about editing from Harriet, who's been a Tor editor since the company was started, and who brought in, among others, Robert Jordan. Harriet had been around for awhile, and she was and still is an extremely able and sharp editor, both for content, and on the line level. I remember when we were working on a project in which the author needed to instill fear in the reader. Harriet pulled out a copy of Fellowship of the Ring and turned to a passage that fairly oozed terror. Right there was the lesson, quickly and effectively delivered. She was great at things like that. At Tempo we were all overworked, simply because there were just a few of us, just four when I got there, then a couple more in the next months. And we were increasing the sales of the line just about every month, doing more different kinds of books, and selling more copies of our backlist titles as we went. It was nerve-wracking, exciting, exhilarating, exhausting . . . and unforgettable.

The last really important mentor I had when I was a young editor was Donald R. Bensen. Don was an editor who worked at Bantam when he got out of college in 1950, and then worked for Pyramid from about 1957 to 1965 (which became Jove in the 1970s), where he rose to editor-in-chief, and where he ran the science fiction line. He later worked at Berkley (where he edited the second Dune novel, among others), and when I met him, in 1973, he was at Ballantine, editing various books, including the Beagle Books ya line. I was introduced to him by one of my writers, Leonore Fleischer, who also was a Ballantine editor at the time. Leonore wrote movie novelizations for us at Award, and I had recently moved up to being an editor, after being an editorial assistant for about a year. Leonore, who wrote novels like Enter the Dragon for us as "Mike Roote" recommended Don to me as someone else who could write tie-in novelizations for us. He did, but he also impressed the hell out of me because he seemed to know so much about publishing, from the editorial side.

But I got to know Don much better when, in 1976, I started at Dell Books and was asked to edit, among other kinds of books, science fiction. (I was also editing the westerns line, and buying reprint rights to hardcovers published by various other publishers. This was when reprint rights were still extremely important to paperback publishers.

Don Bensen was, by this time, a consulting editor for The Dial Press, for the Quantum Science Fiction line, which had been announced, but which hadn't published any books yet. I had been unaware of this line when I started at Dell, but shortly after starting, I was introduced to James Wade, the editor under whose imprint at Dial this program was to be run. Don and I, having worked together before under different circumstances, got along very well, and we became a very effective editorial team. Once I was there, Don and I conspired to convince the Editorial Board of Quantum, Isaac Asimov and Ben Bova, to let us buy various books by a lot of young and some not-so-young SF authors: John Varley, Spider Robinson, Gordon R. Dickson, Gregory Benford, Orson Scott Card, Joan D. Vinge, and later, a novel by Bova himself, when he was no longer on the editorial board.

And then a wonderful thing happened. While we were getting Quantum up and running, with only two or three hardcovers (to be reprinted in Dell SF paperbacks) per year, I was running the Dell SF line. One day my boss, Editor-in-Chief Bill Grose, took Don into his office and discussed the Dell SF line. Apparently, what I was doing was starting to work. I was simply applying what I had already learned under Tom Doherty and in my first job to the Dell line, and started to buy books from authors who I thought were more appropriate to the market than the authors that Dell had been buying before. The previous editor had decided that Dell's SF should be aimed at "readers who don't usually read SF". An interesting concept, and if done just right, it actually might work, in a strange way. The books that worked were The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

But it's hard to make that kind of splash with everything, and a lot of what was in unpublished inventory when I got there was not especially saleable. But there was some good backlist, and I started to reissue good books by Michael Moorcock, Gordon R. Dickson, John Brunner, and others, as well as buying new books by up and coming writers like Greg Bear, Diane Duane, Jeffrey A. Carver, and others.

My boss asked Don Bensen what he would do if he were running the Dell SF line. And bless his heart, Don told him that if he were running it, he'd keep me on to be the in-house editor, while he, Don Bensen, consulted, bringing in some of the authors he'd worked with before, like Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, and other pretty good people.

Well, my boss went for it, and once Don saved my job, I was there for five years, and we published some really fine books. And I got to watch Don write cover copy, amazingly good, fast, perfect cover copy, which helped me learn how to write better copy myself.

And Don generally took me under his wing and shared all sorts of editorial knowledge and tricks and techniques with me, making me feel at first extremely ignorant, and gradually making me feel as if I was starting to understand things I hadn't even suspected I should know—about publishing, and about many other things as well. He was, like other people who mentored me, very generous with his time and knowledge, and I've never forgotten that, either his help, or the help of others who have taught me over the years.

Because of such people, I've always felt that anyone who is in a position to mentor those younger or less experienced in publishing really has an obligation to do so. The better the professionals in publishing understand the publishing process in all its facets, the better books are, and the better they're published. It's a win-win situation. Also, it helps weed out those who aren't really passionate about publishing, which is good, because this is a business that doesn't really work very well unless there's passionate commitment involved by the editors. It's not the easiest business in terms of making a lot of money, but the other rewards are great, if one is interested in books as a life.

I am sure that almost all young editors make the mistake that I know I made early on, of assuming that if an author had talent, he or she could fix mistakes, tighten up, upgrade, improve the story so that it worked the way it should . . . which is not nearly always true. A friend in England tells a story about Alastair Maclean, the very popular author of many action/adventure novels. At the house that published Maclean in England, the newest editor, the one who they gave the "football" books to (soccer to us), also got to edit Maclean. . . . Only the old man was set in his ways, and just didn't want to be edited after a certain point in his career, and it didn't matter what the young editor thought—and they all thought, "Aha! He's got flashes of the vintage stuff in here; I'll work with him, inspire him to get it to its full potential." And it just didn't happen.

But aside from that, every writer has strengths and weaknesses, and some kinds of weaknesses are harder to recognize and strengthen than others. It's just not the sort of thing that always works, and part of being a good editor, and one of the things that I think only experience and good sense gives you, is the judgment of what is and isn't worth trying to fix.

K.A.: Is editing a creative process for you? In times past, editing was more of a collaborative process. Now it seems editors are often the "middle" person between the writer and the publisher, almost acting in the role of agent. Many times the editor doesn't do any actual "editing" of a manuscript. How do you "edit" these days? Have your duties as an editor changed significantly over the years? What does an editor do?

J.F.: Editing certainly can be a creative process for me. I do as much work with authors as I ever have. Also, I'm fortunate that I now work with a lot of very talented writers, many of whom actually welcome intelligent feedback from their editor.

Editors always have been and always will be middle-men as well, however. It's never been any other way, and I don't see the analogy to agent. A good editor advocates for his books in house to get them attention and good treatment. Which is not to say it always works out the way one wants it to, but it's part of an editor's job to go to bat for his books.

As to what an editor does, that's a very long bit of writing to put down. Let's just say that if you made an analogy to a different kind of business, one that produced a number of different products, you'd call an editor a product manager. The editor is responsible for coordinating efforts of many different departments for his books. He isn't the boss of any of these departments, such as art, production, sales, marketing, publicity, promotion and advertising, subsidiary rights, contracts . . . but the editor has to make sure that everything that these departments to relevant to his books gets done right. The editor is responsible for making sure things go the way they should for his books. I hope that helps.

K.A.: What about being an editor do you like best? Is it a collaborative experience for you? Are you just looking for a great story? Great writers?

J.F.: I think what I love best is working with writers who tell a great story, and who also write very well. Getting the two together is fabulous. Given a choice of the two, one has to take the great story, but if you get the two, that's just great. And the real satisfaction is having a book really succeed, either critically, commercially, or best of all, both ways. It's especially satisfying to work with a new author and watch them succeed from scratch. I imagine that the feeling I get might be somewhat akin to what a midwife feels after successfully delivering a healthy baby. Different, of course, and physically worlds apart. But satisfying. I love it when one of my books wins an award, or gets a great review; and when they sell well, that's just wonderful.

K.A.: You are also an agent, writer, father, and husband. Do you find that all these roles mesh creatively for you?

J.F.: Do all my roles mesh creatively? Hmmm. The only way I could see that is if I penned a sitcom (which some of my interns have threatened to do, but I'm waiting . . . ).

I'm not much of a writer right now; just don't have the time, nor do I feel the need to write my own fiction when I'm editing so many writers who are as good if not better than I am. I write copy—catalog copy, jacket and cover copy, editorial letters, etc. but that's about it. (And sometimes, fanzines).

Being a husband . . . well, I'm certainly not alone in that, and one does one's best to balance the parts of one's life. I have a job that doesn't end at the end of the business day, but so does my wife, so she tends to understand, especially when I get dinner ready on time.

As for father, I guess once one's a parent, one is always a parent as long as the children are alive. But one is out of the house, the other is almost to college, so it's a lot easier than it was a few years ago.

And I'm not really an agent anymore, except in some special ways for writers I have represented in the past. Mostly, that's over. It's nice being able to do fewer things; I think it's safe to say that I'm doing what I do better now than I have before, just because I have more experience and somewhat fewer demands on my time, though there are times when that's not true just because of things one can't predict—illness, etc.

K.A.: You have also acted as publisher for the prestigious Bluejay Books. What was that experience like? Did you enjoy being publisher?

J.F.: It was no act! I loved it, though it was a very, very stressful time, since we were also having children at the same time as we started the company. I learned a tremendous amount about the aspects of publishing I knew nothing or little about before becoming a publisher. That was exhilarating, and as I said before, editors need to learn to think like publishers, so I did a bunch more of that. It was fun, but very busy fun.

K.A.: I'm interested in how creative people make their way in the world since so many of us "creative types" end up being edge dwellers. You're married to writer Joan Vinge, so your family is really "in" the business. Or "in" the world of creativity. Plus you have children. Most of my writing and artist friends have no children. Have you found it problematic to make a living in this field? Publishing is a precarious business.

J.F.: Oh, life is precarious. And every person is unique, with unique abilities and problems. So it's hard for me to generalize about this. Our fortunes rise and fall at various times, for various reasons. It's never been dull, that's for sure. We've done all right. There have been times when Joan has made a lot more money than me, and at one point, she supported Bluejay Books's overhead with her writing; at other times, I've made more than she has. Between us, we've juggled the demands of growing children, a two-career household, a business, and the everyday business of living for over twenty years, and while it has sometimes been difficult because of one thing or another, I can't say what I would change if I'd had the chance, other than some of the circumstances beyond our control . . . but that's the sort of thing that only works in alternate-history stories, not real life. 0 comments

Monday, February 16, 2004

Interview With James Frenkel Part II